Air India Flight 171

[jetsetdanny]

One real-life reference to JSW I hate to see... What a terrible tragedy!

[jetsetdanny]

I also posted this on the “Central Cavern – The Wonderful World of Willy” Facebook group. It got some adverse reactions, and then my post was deleted by the admin. So much for freedom of speech.

While we still enjoy it here, I’d like to explain why I posted it — beyond it being a personal way of coming to terms with this horrible event. I believe it offers a moment for reflection and serves as a grave warning.

The warning is: don’t treat concepts that can become tragic as a joke. If it happened in “JSW,” the most brilliant of all games, it can happen elsewhere, too.

“JSW” is famous for its humour—often described as British or Monty-Pythonesque—and that humour is one of its great assets.

I understand that a plane crashing into the upper part of Willy’s mansion is part of that absurd humour. It must have been well received, since DrUnKeN mAsTeR!!! perpetuated it in his first JSW remake, even giving the room an explicit name that ensured the graphic design wouldn’t go unnoticed.

However, more than forty years later, a strange twist of fate made this absurd invention tragically real. The images of the Air India engine smashed into a building were so graphic and shocking—especially knowing that people on the ground died, too, perhaps in that very structure.

(A side note: the fact that we’re comparing a modern tragedy to a scene from a four-decades-old computer game itself speaks volumes about JSW’s lasting impact and legacy.)

So from now on every time I pass through “Under the Roof” and “Nomen Luni,” I’ll think of the poor souls who perished in the Air India Flight 171 disaster—and of the one gentleman who miraculously walked away from the wreckage. I really don’t think I’ll ever be able to avoid that association.

In the Facebook group, people freely share real-life photos referring to various aspects of JSW: MegaTrees, Maria, André the chef, and so on—and I love and cherish those discussions. That’s why I was taken aback by some of the group members’ reaction to my post. Then I thought that for those fans, JSW is a cheerful, pleasant subject, and they want it to stay that way. They don’t want to link it to anything sad or unpleasant.

That attitude is understandable, but if you really love something, you should love it all: “for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health.” You should embrace it, flaws and all. If you truly love JSW, you should be able to accept its newly revealed, disquieting dimension. If you enjoy sharing pictures of MegaTrees or Maria or André the chef, how can you turn away from the images of a plane engine lodged in a building outside Ahmedabad?

There's one other example of a similar warning that comes to my mind. I love old (very old!) U.S. folk music. One of its great icons was Pete Seeger. Among the hundreds of songs he performed was “Old Time Religion,” a humorous take on a traditional church song. It features verses like:

“We will pray with Aphrodite,
We will pray with Aphrodite,
She wears that see-through nightie,
And it’s good enough for me.”

“We will pray with those old druids,
They drink fermented fluids,
Waltzing naked through the woo-ids,
And it’s good enough for me.”

and so on.

But then comes the verse:

“We’ll do dances to bring water,
Sacrifice animals for slaughter,
Sacrifice our sons and daughters,
And it’s good enough for me.”

I’ve always found that verse ominous rather than funny. Child sacrifice was an actual practice in some ancient cultures. When Pete Seeger sang that verse at his 1980 Sanders Theatre concert, some people in the audience reacted with laughter. But imagine hearing news of some kind of weird modern-day religious cult that murdered its own children as a sacrifice — something that’s entirely possible in this strange world we live in — and then that laughter would come back to haunt them, much like the images of Air India Flight 171’s engine driven into a building are something we can’t shake from our minds...

Pete Seeger was a genius, and I’ll continue to love his music despite that verse. Matthew Smith is equally a genius in his realm, and I’ll continue to love JSW despite those haunting crash images that I can never erase from my mind. And I just wanted to share this reflection on how we should be careful what we laugh about.

[Jet Set Willie]

Danny, I understand your points and I am thinking quite the same, so I will not arise any of your words for a continuing conversation. Just wanting to say, that I have got many good ideas about room names for my possible future games and existing games, too, and what will happen there in those rooms. Those names and ideas were to be presented in a very nice way, but I thought that no matter how nicely and no bad intentions at all they would have been presented, no means to make people laugh at some things there what would be not so nice things in the real world, the way those ideas would have been presented would have been a bad thing to many people on this planet, there are people who had suffered about such things, so I refused to use them. My idea would have been to make people notice that such things were/are happening in this world, not to laugh at them, but still I thought to not add them to my games.

But you might be able to see some mild action, though, depending on how well you may fare in my games.

 

Edited June 25, 2025 by Jet Set Willie

[DigitalDuck]

The way I look at it, the plane crash happened, and it's a tragedy. There's nothing I can do about it; I can choose to cheer myself up with jokes, or stay miserable without them, but the tragedy happened either way. Obviously there's a sense of occasion, and maybe making light of it directly to the victims' families is in poor taste, but I'd rather be happy.

It's a bit like the old wisdom: you should find farts funny, because otherwise you're choosing to have less joy in your life but the same number of farts.